Morning Brief: Canada is back?

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A good morning to you, it’s Friday!! It’s also Treasury Board Scott Brison’s least favourite day of the year: Freedom of Information Day (#FreedomOfInformationDay). The day marks the birthday of American founding father James Madison, who, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, authored the Federalist Papers and went on to become the fourth president of the U.S. Madison had particularly strong views on government secrecy, espousing that the newly formed government should hold no secrets from the people it serves.

Patrick Brown leaves Queen’s Park after a press conference on Wednesday, January 24, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Aaron Vincent Elkaim

Guess who’s not back … or coming back: Patrick Brown. The deposed Ontario PC leader has now been told to take a hike by his former party. “The unanimous decision of the Provincial Nomination Committee was that Patrick Brown will not be an eligible candidate for nomination in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte,” reads a party statement. Moments later, Brown issued a statement of his own: “After much thought, I will not be running in the upcoming provincial election.”

Hey, Liberals, how about a little steak with that sizzle? Well, maybe Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette didn’t quite put it that way, but the PBO did call out the Trudeau government for its dearth of detail in last month’s federal budget. In particular, Fréchette’s team took umbrage with Finance Minister Bill Morneau‘s unwillingness to make public why the government has shifted about $16 billion in planned infrastructure spending to future years, sweetening the government’s bottom line heading into the 2019 election. “When I look at that information (about the $16 billion), there’s nothing there that should be confidential,” said Deputy PBO Mostafa Askari.

Singh did reverse a previous position on the glorification by some Sikhs of Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind of the Air India bombings that killed 329 people, including 268 Canadians headed to India for their summer holidays. Having as recently as late last year refused to accept the findings of the RCMP investigation that identified Parmar as the principal culprit, Singh yesterday reversed course and said: “I accept the findings of the investigation, of the inquiry. I accept them and I condemn all those responsible.”

One man who placed his unwavering faith in democracy was Lucien Bouchard, who broke away from Brian Mulroney’s government to form the Bloc Québecois. Bouchard said yesterday that he is “discouraged” by the collapse of the BQ in recent weeks, which saw seven of the party’s 10 MPs leave the party to sit as independents. “When you’ve been the founder of the Bloc and you know what the Bloc has managed to do, with its successes, and its failures, and you look at what is happening now, you get very discouraged,” he said.

Team Trudeau is standing behind a Canadian diplomat who was pilloried in Barbados for allegedly interfering in domestic politics by suggesting the Caribbean country isn’t taking the necessary steps to engage more women in politics. A spokesman for foreign minister Chrystia Freeland said Canadian High Commissioner to Barbados Marie Legault was “in no way endorsing any candidate in their upcoming election. On the contrary, she was (speaking) to Canada’s well-established feminist foreign policy as the keynote speaker at an event highlighting gender issues in the Caribbean on International Women’s Day. Canada is proud to support the greater participation of women in all spheres, including politics and government, around the world.”

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May scrums with media in Ottawa on Monday, January 25, 2016. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

While B.C. and Alberta duke it out over the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, the company behind the project has successfully sought the court’s help in getting protesters out of the way, though they’re still within spitting distance — literally. Protesters must keep at least five meters away from two Kinder Morgan work sites, which means they can’t block roads or hinder work at the Burnaby Terminal and the Westridge Marine Terminal. Trans Mountain’s lawyers had asked for a protest camp to be removed, but Justice Kenneth Affleck said that would be overkill. “In my view there has to be a means of allowing the protesters who object to this work to remain reasonably close to the site…. The plaintiff is going to have to tolerate a certain amount of agitation.”

HERE AND THERE

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is in Grande Prairie to speak to the Canadian Union of Public Employees convention, and is planning to slip in some kind of “energy announcement” as part of the deal;

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh joins striking academic workers on the picket line at York University in Toronto;

Is the President sweating? Special counsel Robert Mueller has, in recent weeks, subpoenaed the Trump Organisation, ordering it to hand over all documents related to Russia. According to the New York Times, the details of the subpoena are not clear, nor is it clear why Mueller issued a subpoena to the Trump Organisation — an umbrella organisation encompassing all of Donald Trump’s business ventures — rather than simply asking for documents.

Whatever the unknowns, this is the closest Mueller’s investigation has come to the president, so that’s got to have POTUS on edge just a little.

It looks as though Trump’s enchantment with three-star generals wearing off. The president is all set to send H.R. McMaster packing, but is shopping around for a replacement first and determining a way to do the deed without humiliating his security adviser. Apparently, McMaster and Trump have never really bonded, and this forthcoming ousting is part of a larger White House staffing shake-up in the works.

House Democrats say they have proof that the axing of career emloyees of the U.S. State Department have been politically motivated. According to a whistleblower report, the White House worked with a team of conservative activists to clear our employees who were not loyal enough to Trump.